An interesting point of view 
Or was it sarcasm?
I confess. It was sarcasm. It is an extension of the silly national obsession of leaving sad and bedraggled bouquets of (dead) flowers and soggy miserable teddy bears at spots where a fatality has happened in the last couple of years.
I say silly because the practice of having cemeteries and 'gardens of rememberance' grew out of the need of people to reflect quietly on the departed in an appropriate location and away from the danger that caused the death in the first place. They used to be noted as 'Black spots' if people started trends in dying in particular places.
Oddly, is has also become a national trait to feel revulsion for the location of a grisly crime and feel the need to dispose of it as opposed to celebrate a public death site.
Marked battlefields of historic note where hundreds had died, I can understand, but the emphasis on individual deaths is, I feel, taking things too far.
The media seems to be the villain here as it seems it is not the fact that a dirty deed was done, but rather, the press have made a national issue of it and people feel too embarrassed to live there. After all, if we were to turn all of our death sites into gardens of rememberance or whatnot, with a population racing past 57 million we would pretty soon run out of places to occupy and have to resort to pitching our tents in those gardens of rememberance. Cast a thought as to how many people have already died in this island to grasp a degree of scale involved.
People have got to be far too sensitive nowadays, and seize with gusto any passing chance to be upset at something - anything!
Maybe we are in need of a war or something to re-unite us with some of the realities of life like people die. Their deaths, in sometimes less that pleasant circumstances, is sad and depressing but the cemetery is the place for the grieving. The rest of us should get over it and move on.
The need for cemeteries grew from the knowledge that dead bodies smell and, as they decompose, lead to illness among the living thus, since early history, mankind has looked for ways of putting the dead beyond the area in which he lives. Nothing to do with quiet reflection but simple hygiene. Different cultures have tackled this problem in a variety of ways. In our culture the church took over this responsibility some hundreds of years ago but "cemeteries" have been found that far predate Christianity thus we can be certain that even early man practiced some form of ceremonial disposal of the dead. The places chosen have always become sites of ritual as our knowledge that we will all eventually die is the one thing that separates us from other animals. The ceremony and ritual surrounding death has a significance in our culture and has since the very beginning. It is based in the celebration of the life now departed, the deeds done by the departed, the life led by that person and is usually performed by the deceased's family and friends tho' there are many recorded cases of enemies saluting the passing of an honoured and respected foe. Of course the interference of the Church and their determination to control every aspect of life extended to death and churchyards became the place where the ceremonies would be performed ~ with all the additional ritual that the church always likes to dress things up in..
In Britain the Cemeteries Act of 1853 removed the responsibility from the Established Church and handed it to Local Authorities (I'll not bore you all with the reasons for this when a glance at the average churchyard will show how crowded they had become). In 1894 Cardiff became the first authority in Britain to seek and gain an Act that permitted cremation as a way of disposing of a corpse. The main reason for seeking this act was again the lack of space for burials. In 1902 the Cremation Act granted other local authorities the right to establish crematoria and gradually cremation became more acceptable to the general public until today it is the most common form of disposal of the dead in the UK. Gardens of Remembrance really did not get going until many years later, when the practice of keeping "Dad's Ashes" in an urn on the mantle fell out of fashion.
To visit the grave of a loved one does not seem to me to be excessive and when the corpse has been cremated it is not unreasonable to have a Garden of Remembrance or somewhere similar where the ashes may be interred or scattered and, should they take comfort from visiting the place, then it is right that the survivors should be able to visit the place. For many it is a necessary act of grieving.
The "Mournarama" is a national disgrace and enlightened Local Authorities (EG Milton Keynes) have taken powers to remove such shrines after a period of seven days. This seems to me to be a reasonable compromise between the need some people feel to express their grief and the need to keep matters in proportion for the rest of us.
Yes people die all the time and I really don't think anyone has suggested that each and every death should be a cause to pull down the property in which they died. We wouldn't have many hospitals left for a start. But I do think that where a particularly gruesome and well publicised series of murders have been committed or lain hidden for many years there is a case to remove that particular property ~ quite apart from the fact that the police seem to leave so little of the property standing that it will probably have to come down anyway.
As for the War Cemeteries ~ they are a totally different matter and came about because of the huge losses suffered in WWI, following which there was no practical way of returning the dead to their families for burial. There was, in fact, a public outcry against this idea and it took many months to force the legislation through. Once established though this practice was followed during and after WWII. They are deeply moving places and serve as a permanent reminder of the folly of mankind's ambition.
Do we need another war to "re-unite us with the realities of life"? Well it may have escaped your attention but we are fighting two wars at the moment ~ in fact there has hardly been a time since 1945 when we have not been engaged in a war of one sort or another and many a British Serviceman remains in "some corner of a foreign field" as a result.
We seem to have come so far and yet learned so little.
